Technological fixes to time-honoured problems are all the rage these days.
Bitcoin is meant to fix money, social media are seen as an antidote to Rupert Murdoch and assorted tyrants, networked robots are to help countries like Japan deal with demographic declines etc. Perhaps the largest claim is that the Internet has helped (or is about to help) democratize capitalism. Ten years ago that claim struck me as both fascinating and dubious. So, I sat down and wrote an article about it (circa 2004). Its gist: The Internet is a wonderful leveller.
But democracy requires a great deal more than mere ‘levelling.’ Primarily, it requires political institutions that enable the economically weak to have a decisive say on policy against the interests of the rich and powerful. Ten years later, I am re-visiting this question, under the shadow of a global crisis that made it even harder to convert an e’Demos into genuine e’Democracy. What follows is an updated version of the original paper.
The Internet’s toughest assignment: To put Demos back into Democracy
(CNN) — The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military's cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA's power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that's increasingly putting us all at risk. It's time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.
Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA's missions.
What is being lost, or at least weakened, has long been forecast: the role of a few television network news organizations as a unifying central nervous system of information for the nation, and the communal benefits associated with that. Some may mourn the loss, especially those who grew up with network news. (More than half the audience for the evening network news programs is 50 or older.) Viewers and social critics may debate whether the gains accompanying the growing diversity and flexibility of news and information delivery outweigh the losses. But quite aside from the fact that nothing can be done to stop the technological advances, the benefits in choice and content are clear.
Millions of us share our most personal feelings and most potentially damaging data through our smartphones. But isn’t it time to lock them down after last June’s revelations that the NSA collects data from phone calls, texts and emails of people all over the world? The developers of Blackphone, a new privacy-focused smartphone, say ‘yes.’
Toby Weir-Jones, the general manager of Blackphone, says the NSA’s digital surveillance has created a new demand for privacy, Newsweek reports. However, he says, “the wider market was not equipped to look for a solution.” Apple and Android phones, says Weir-Jones, are caught up in a battle over larger screen sizes, higher resolution and faster operating systems, while Blackphone is offering privacy.
Theoretically, experts say, the new device could provide considerable security for users trying to protect themselves from corporate spying and the countries with lesser surveillance programs than the US. Blackphone, which goes on presale February 24,can do texting, video, calling, searching, browsing, file storage and sharing — all shielded from the prying eyes of governments and hackers.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a story about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter entitled, “Is the F-35 Worth It?” But watching the piece, I saw no debate whatsoever of that very important question.
And for good reason. All the interview subjects were government employees or contractors. They’d have been crazy to criticize their own program.
What I did see on Sunday was an ill-informed reporter—David Martin—touring the military side of the $400-billion F-35 program … and throwing in just a few boilerplate questions.
These questions were softballs, considering how big of a blunder this program actually has been. The F-35 is meant to replace 2,400 existing warplanes in the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. Complex and badly compromised by the need to meet all the military branches’ diverse needs, the JSF is overpriced, unreliable and sluggish.
Zim American-Israeli Shipping (“Zim”) was the predecessor company of the present Zim Integrated Shipping Services and was 49 percent owned by the Israeli government on 9/11. In 2004, the Israeli government sold their interest to the Israeli Ofer Brothers Group, which then became the sole owner of the company.1 On 9/11, Zim’s headquarters’ was in Haifa, Israel, and it had worldwide regional offices in Hong Kong, Hamburg, Germany, and Manhattan, New York/Norfolk, Virginia.2
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At the time of the 9/11 attacks Zim was one of two Israeli companies with lease contracts at the WTC. The other Israeli tenant, Clear Forest, had a small office of 18 employees on the 47th floor of WTC 1 (the North Tower). According to the Jerusalem Post, Clear Forest had only four or five employees at the WTC on 9/11 and all escaped uninjured.3 Although there were some variances in the WTC 1 tenant rosters between various media organizations, the majority showed that Zim occupied all of the 16th floor (WTC floor space approximated 50,000 square feet), 10,000 square feet of the 17th floor, and some space of the 29th floor of WTC 1.4 Zim had about 250 employees at the WTC before its move-out, which would require somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 to 60,000 square feet of office space.5
Amazingly fortunate for Zim, the company moved out of the WTC around Sept. 4, 2001 and into a newly built office building in Norfolk, Va., even though they had a significant remaining lease obligation at the WTC.6 In fact, Zim picked this lucky move-out date about six months before they actually moved. An April 3, 2001 article in the Virginian-Pilot stated, “Zim expects to open the new (Norfolk) building by Sept. 4 and will eventually employ 235 people.”7 Coincidently, pilot hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Shehhi were inexplicably in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area in February and April 2001 at the time Zim was apparently in the search and planning process for their Norfolk building.8 Although Zim is reported to have had about 10 of its purported 20 remaining employees at the WTC on 9/11, none were killed or injured.9 However, other media reports stated that Zim had 35 sales and marketing people and additional computer personnel remaining at the WTC on 9/11, indicating Zim had a small percentage of its remaining staff at the WTC on 9/11.10
